An MMT response to Jared Bernstein – Part 2

This is the second part of my response to an article posted by American political analyst Jared Berstein (January 7, 2018) – Questions for the MMTers. Part 1 considered the thorny issue of the capacity of fiscal policy to be an effective counter-stabilising force over the economic cycle, in particular to be able to prevent an economy from ‘overheating’ (whatever that is in fact). Jared Berstein prescribes some sort of Monetarist solution where all the counter-stabilising functions are embedded in the central bank which he erroneously thinks can “take money out of the economy” at will. It cannot and its main policy tool – interest rate setting – is a very ineffective tool for influencing the state of nominal demand. In Part 2, I consider his other claims which draw on draw on the flawed analysis of Paul Krugman about bond issuance. An understanding of MMT shows that none of these claims carry weight. It is likely that continuous deficits will be required even at full employment given the leakages from the income-spending cycle in the non-government sector. Jared Bernstein represents a typical ‘progressive’ view of macroeconomics but the gap between that (neoliberal oriented) view and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is wide. For space reasons, I have decided to make this a three-part response. I will post Part 3 tomorrow or Thursday. I hope this three-part series might help the (neoliberal) progressives to abandon some of these erroneous macroeconomic notions and move towards the MMT position, which will give them much more latitude to actually implement their progressive policy agenda.

Question about Krugman’s “finance-ability” claims

The issue raised by Jared Bernstein draws on an August 15, 2011 article by Paul Krugman – MMT, again.

In that article, Krugman claims that:

1. “a deficit financed by money issue is more inflationary than a deficit financed by bond issue” – which is clearly false. More later.

2. “the money-financed deficit would lead to hyperinflation” – clearly false as a general rule.

3. “When people expect inflation, they become reluctant to hold cash, which drive prices up and means that the government has to print more money to extract a given amount of real resources, which means higher inflation” – clearly ridiculous. If people are reluctant to save and spend instead then the fiscal deficit will be smaller.

If the government wishes to retain the same hold over real resources then it will have to deprive the non-government sector of purchasing power in these cases. Please read Part 1 – for the discussion about this.

4. If the government tries to spend without issuing bonds “the currency is destroyed. This would not happen, even with the same deficit, if the government can still sell bonds” – clearly false.

5. “the MMT people are just wrong in believing that the only question you need to ask about the budget deficit is whether it supplies the right amount of aggregate demand; financeability matters too, even with fiat money” – clearly, it is Krugman that is in error not the MMT economists.

I will, of course, explain the annotations after each of the above quotes.

The basic response is that if Krugman’s claims “that self-financing is more inflationary that bond issuance” were true then the sequence of quantitative easing episodes in Japan, the US, Britain, Eurozone over several decades would have resulted in very high inflation rates.

That hasn’t happened which really tells you everything.

But the myths that Krugman perpetuates still underpin Jared Bernstein’s questions in this context.

He says:

One could argue that the government doesn’t have to sell bonds — it can just print money — but it does sell bonds, it always has and probably always will. Moreover, it doesn’t just sell them to itself. It sells them to open markets of investors who could, under conditions triggered by printing-press reliance, decide not to buy them without an exorbitant risk premium. A model that assumes otherwise may raise interesting ideas, but, like discounting the role of the Fed and interest rate policy, risks being of limited real-world utility.

This is a very confused question in fact.

The government does not spend by ‘printing money’. It credits bank accounts, irrespective of any other monetary operations that might be performed in an accompanying manner (such as issuing bonds).

The US government does not really sell debt to “open markets” but rather via a selective ‘sealed-bid single price auction’ process where the authorised primary government security dealers (which have special accounts with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York) dominate the auction.

So within that context (bond issuance) how might we get “conditions trigger by printing-press reliance”? Not logical.

Further, it is true that the US government or any government for that matter can make itself hostage to the private bond dealers – by which I mean allow the private bond markets to set whatever yields on the debt they desire at the primary auction process and embody those yields into the liability the government assumes.

But, governments also know they effectively can control the process whenever they want – and set yields at any maturity they desire via central bank operations. So a government never has to accept an “exorbitant risk premium” on debt it issues.

Then, Krugman invokes the hyperinflation fear.

During the GFC, the US Federal Reserve, like many central banks bought large proportions of the outstanding debt (usually on secondary markets) with no inflationary consequences.

The reason? Adding reserves to the banking system is not intrinsically inflationary.

We will explore these concerns.

But first, Paul Krugman really disqualified himself from discussing macroeconomics in my view back when he tried to pull rank and give the Japanese government gratuitous advice in the 1990s on how to handle the difficulties their economy was in following the huge property market collapse in 1991.

The advice that Krugman gave the Bank of Japan was deeply flawed.

The economic decline in the 1990s in Japan was driven by the non-government debt build up that began in the 1970s and accelerated during the 1980s.

The asset price boom that was fuelled by the debt accumulation (primarily tied to land) was ultimately terminated by contractionary Bank of Japan monetary policy.

The subsequent crash in asset values and the resulting balance sheet adjustments that followed give rise to the term – “balance sheet recession”.

Japanese economist Richard Koo wrote in his 2003 book – Balance Sheet Recession: Japan’s Struggle with Uncharted Economics and its Global Implications: that during the process of balance sheet restructuring within the non-government sector, the priority is to pay off debt rather than pursue profit.

In turn, this suppresses aggregate demand as investment and consumption spending plunges. The downturn reinforces the pessimism and credit-worthy borrowers dry up and bankruptcies rise.

Importantly, the lack of bank lending is not due to reserve constraints but because, even at low interest rates (zero), no-one worthy wants to borrow because the expectations of returns are ruled by pessimism.

Koo understood full well that in these situations the circuit breaker has to be fiscal policy

Monetary policy has no role to play in this context.

Krugman might have extolled the virtues of fiscal policy in the recent GFC (note below) but he was firmly Monetarist prior to that – a sort of economic chameleon – who runs with whatever idea he thinks will make him popular at the time.

If the Groupthink specifies a reliance on monetary policy – Krugman will be writing about that. If there is a swing towards fiscal policy – guess what?

Back in May 1998, when the conservatives had pressured the Japanese government into contracting net spending (via tax hike) which pushed the economy back into recession, Krugman wrote an Op Ed article – Japan’s Trap.

He noted that Japan was suffering from a spending gap and that fiscal policy solutions should be avoided because “there is a government fiscal constraint” and the Japanese Government would only be wasting its spending.

There was no fiscal constraint just an ideological preference against fiscal deficits.

He then said that monetary policy had been ineffective because:

… private actors view its … [Bank of Japan] … actions as temporary, because they believe that the central bank is committed to price stability as a long-run goal. And that is why monetary policy is ineffective! Japan has been unable to get its economy moving precisely because the market regards the central bank as being responsible, and expects it to rein in the money supply if the price level starts to rise.

The way to make monetary policy effective, then, is for the central bank to credibly promise to be irresponsible – to make a persuasive case that it will permit inflation to occur, thereby producing the negative real interest rates the economy needs.

This sounds funny as well as perverse. … [but] … the only way to expand the economy is to reduce the real interest rate; and the only way to do that is to create expectations of inflation.

History shows he was completely wrong in this diagnosis. The only thing that got Japan moving again in the early part of this Century was fiscal policy.

Koo wrote that:

Western academics like Paul Krugman advised the BOJ to administer quantitative easing to stop the deflation. Ultimately – and reluctantly – the BOJ took their advice, and in 2001 the Bank expanded bank reserves dramatically from ¥5 trillion to ¥30 trillion.

Nonetheless, both economic activity and asset prices continued to fall, and the inflation projected by Western academics never materialized.

The reason that quantitative easing did not work in Japan and has not achieved its aims since is elementary. MMT economists have been providing the answer for more than two decades now.

No-one in the private sector wanted to borrow and without borrowing and subsequent spending how will inflation evolve!

The likes of Krugman thought that by flooding the banks with reserves they would loan them out. But banks do not loan out reserves. They are special account balances that serve the purpose of clearing transactions.

In the 1990s, the firms were so indebted and their assets depleted by the collapse in property prices that their main focus was on restoring some sustainability to their financial positions rather than going further into debt.

Second, Krugman is back at it in his latest New York Times column (January 9, 2017) – Deficits Matter Again.

After extolling the virtues of deficits a while ago, he is now trying to reverse direction to score points against Donald Trump and his tax policy.

In doing so he demonstrates how flawed his ‘mainstream textbook’ analysis is. The erroneous claims he makes in this article bear on Jared Bernstein’s seeming blind faith in following Krugman.

I agree with Krugman that the Republican Party claims that Obama deficits were shocking were just political point scoring. The deficits never mattered per se and were too low at the height of the crisis given the lost output that ensued.

He also states that “America, which borrows in its own currency and therefore can’t run out of cash”. So why did he say the Japanese government which is the same position as the US government was facing a fiscal constraint? You can answer that for yourselves – easily – chameleon.

But, of course, Krugman is trying to eviscerate Trump politically. After all he invested many New York Times’ columns trumpetting support for Hillary Clinton.

Obviously the Observer is closely tied to Trump but its assessment of Krugman and Clinton in this regard was pretty accurate.

What is Krugman’s line on deficits now?

1. He claims the US economy is now close to full employment and that means:

… government borrowing once again competes with the private sector for a limited amount of money. This means that deficit spending no longer provides much if any economic boost, because it drives up interest rates and “crowds out” private investment.

2. “government borrowing can still be justified if it serves an important purpose: Interest rates are still very low, and borrowing at those low rates to invest in much-needed infrastructure is still a very good idea, both because it would raise productivity and because it would provide a bit of insurance against future downturns.”

This is a very conventional view for a mainstream (neoliberal) economist. This sort of nonsense gets taught in universities around the world every day.

As a matter of logic, if Krugman thinks that the economy is close to full employment (meaning that there are few real resources available) then borrowing at low interest rates to spend on infrastructure projects will increase the demand for the available real resources and drive up prices.

But according to Krugman this would also drive up nominal interest rates because there are scarce funds available. Then the question is why interest rates are so low – because in Krugman’s mainstream framework – crowding out can only occur if the demand for funds outstrips the supply and drives up the price.

So even these twisted claims are very confused.

But confusion aside, they are also incorrect inferences to be drawn from the way the banking system operates.

The ‘financial crowding out’ story is deeply embedded in mainstream macroeconomics. It is one of the enduring myths to be found in the mainstream macroeconomics literature.

It is a central plank in the mainstream economics attack on government fiscal intervention. At the heart of this conception is the theory of loanable funds, which is an aggregate construction of the way financial markets are thought to work.

The original conception was designed to explain how aggregate demand could never fall short of aggregate supply because interest rate adjustments would always bring investment and saving into equality.

At the heart of this erroneous hypothesis is a flawed viewed of financial markets. The so-called loanable funds market is constructed by the mainstream economists as serving to mediate saving and investment via interest rate variations.

Any external capital availability (from foreign sources) was ignored.

This is pre-Keynesian thinking and was a central part of the so-called classical model where perfectly flexible prices delivered self-adjusting, market-clearing aggregate markets at all times.

If consumption fell, then saving would rise and this would not lead to an oversupply of goods because investment (capital goods production) would rise in proportion with saving.

So while the composition of output might change (workers would be shifted between the consumption goods sector to the capital goods sector), a full employment equilibrium was always maintained as long as price flexibility was not impeded.

The interest rate became the vehicle to mediate saving and investment to ensure that there was never any gluts.

So saving (supply of funds) is conceived of as a positive function of the real interest rate because rising rates increase the opportunity cost of current consumption and thus encourage saving. Investment (demand for funds) declines with the interest rate because the costs of funds to invest in (houses, factories, equipment etc) rises.

Changes in the interest rate thus create continuous equilibrium such that aggregate demand always equals aggregate supply and the composition of final demand (between consumption and investment) changes as interest rates adjust.

According to this theory, if there is a rising fiscal deficit then there is increased demand placed on the scarce savings (via the alleged need to borrow by the government) and this pushes interest rates to “clear” the loanable funds market. This chokes off investment spending.

This is exactly what Krugman (and implicitly Jared Bernstein) think.

So allegedly, when the government borrows to ‘finance’ its fiscal deficit, it crowds out private borrowers who are trying to finance investment.

The mainstream economists conceive of this as the government reducing national saving (by running a fiscal deficit) and pushing up interest rates which damage private investment.

The basic flaws in the mainstream story are that governments just borrow back the net financial assets that they create when they spend. Its a wash!

It is true that the private sector might wish to spread these financial assets across different portfolios. But then the implication is that the private spending component of total demand will rise and there will be a reduced need for net public spending (that is, deficits).

Further, they assume that savings are finite and the government spending is financially constrained which means it has to seek ‘funding’ in order to progress their fiscal plans.

But government spending by stimulating income also stimulates saving.

Additionally, and crucially, credit-worthy private borrowers can usually access credit from the banking system. Banks lend independent of their reserve position so government debt issuance does not impede this liquidity creation.

But we jump ahead.

Most Post Keynesians (non-MMT heterodox economists) eschew the crowding out hypothesis by recourse to statements about the capacity of the government to ‘print money’ or the access global capital markets, which are outside of the direct influence of domestic interest rates, offers local borrowers.

In other words, they do not directly challenge the notion that fiscal deficits drive up interest rates per se. They just argue that interest rate rises can be mitigated by these other channels (money printing, global borrowing).

Where MMT departs from this literature is to explicitly integrate bank reserves into the analysis in a way that no previous Post Keynesian analysis had attempted.

The MMT framework shows that far from placing upward pressure on interest rates, fiscal deficits in fact, set in place dynamics that place pressure on interest rates in the opposite direction.

How does that occur?

The central bank operations aim to manage the liquidity in the banking system such that short-term interest rates match the official targets which define the current monetary policy stance.

In achieving this aim the central bank may: (a) Intervene into the interbank money market (for example, the Federal funds market in the US) to manage the daily supply of and demand for funds; (b) buy certain financial assets at discounted rates from commercial banks; (c) offer a return on excess bank reserves, and (d) impose penal lending rates on banks who require urgent funds.

In practice, most of the liquidity management is achieved through (a), although in recent times (as QE has become the norm) central banks are using option (c) more than in the past.

That being said, central bank operations function to offset operating factors in the system by altering the composition of reserves, cash, and securities, but do not alter net financial asset position of the non-government sectors.

Money markets are where commercial banks (and other intermediaries) trade short-term financial instruments between themselves in order to meet reserve requirements or otherwise gain funds for commercial purposes. All these transactions net to zero.

Commercial banks maintain accounts with the central bank which permit reserves to be managed and also the clearing system to operate smoothly.

In addition to setting a lending rate (discount rate), the central bank also sets a support rate which is paid on commercial bank reserves held by the central bank. This support rate becomes the interest-rate floor for the economy. It may be zero.

The short-run or operational target interest rate, which represents the current monetary policy stance, is set by the central bank between the discount and support rate. This effectively creates a corridor or a spread within which the short-term interest rates can fluctuate with liquidity variability. It is this spread that the central bank manages in its daily operations.

In most nations, commercial banks by law have to maintain positive reserve balances at the central bank, accumulated over some specified period. At the end of each day commercial banks have to appraise the status of their reserve accounts. Those that are in deficit can borrow the required funds from the central bank at the discount rate.

Alternatively banks with excess reserves are faced with earning the support rate which may be below the current market rate of interest on overnight funds if they do nothing.

Clearly it is profitable for banks with excess funds to lend to banks with deficits at market rates. Competition between banks with excess reserves for custom puts downward pressure on the short-term interest rate (overnight funds rate) and depending on the state of overall liquidity may drive the interbank rate down below the operational target interest rate.

When the system is in surplus overall this competition would drive the rate down to the support rate.

The demand for short-term funds in the money market is a negative function of the interbank interest rate since at a higher rate less banks are willing to borrow some of their expected shortages from other banks, compared to risk that at the end of the day they will have to borrow money from the central bank to cover any mistaken expectations of their reserve position.

The main instrument of this liquidity management is through open market operations, that is, buying and selling government debt.

In the absence of adjustments to the support rates offered on reserves, when the competitive pressures in the overnight funds market drives the interbank rate below the desired target rate, the central bank drains liquidity by selling government debt.

This open market intervention therefore will result in a higher value for the overnight rate.

The significant point for this discussion is to expose the myth of crowding out.

Net government spending (deficits) which is not taken into account by the central bank in its liquidity decision, will manifest as excess reserves (cash supplies) in the clearing balances (bank reserves) of the commercial banks at the central bank.

MMT refers to this a system-wide surplus.

In these circumstances, the commercial banks will be faced with earning the (possibly lower) support rate return on surplus reserve funds if they do not seek profitable trades with other banks, who may be deficient of reserve funds.

The ensuing competition to offload the excess reserves puts downward pressure on the overnight rate. However, because these transactions necessarily net to zero, the interbank trading cannot clear the system-wide surplus.

Accordingly, if the central bank desires to maintain the current target overnight rate, then it must drain this surplus liquidity by selling government debt or offer a competitive return on the excess reserves to choke off the competitive forces.

That is, the bond sales (debt issuance) allows the central bank to drain any excess reserves in the cash-system and therefore curtail the downward pressure on the interest rate. In doing so it maintains control of monetary policy.

Importantly:

Fiscal deficits place downward pressure on interest rates;

Bond sales maintain interest rates at the central bank target rate.

Accordingly, the concept of debt monetisation, which is a central part of mainstream thinking, is a non sequitur.

Milton Friedman claimed that to avoid ‘crowding out’ the government has to fund the whole deficit via money supply increases.

Which then, according to the likes of Krugman would lead to hyperinflation.

That assertion remains standard doctrine.

But when we understand how bank reserves are affected by fiscal deficits (an MMT insight), we quickly realise that once the overnight rate target is set by the central bank, the latter should only trade government securities if liquidity changes are required to support this target.

Given the central bank cannot control the reserves then debt monetisation is strictly impossible unless the central bank permits the excess reserves to rise indefinitely and pays a return to the banks for excess reserve holdings.

Imagine that the central bank traded government securities with the treasury, which then increased government spending. The excess reserves from the fiscal deficits would force the central bank to sell the same amount of government securities to the private market or allow the overnight rate to fall to the support level (which might be zero).

This is not monetisation but rather the central bank simply acting as broker in the context of the logic of the interest rate setting monetary policy.

Ultimately, private agents may refuse to hold any further stocks of cash or bonds.

With no debt issuance, the interest rates will fall to the central bank support limit (which may be zero).

It is then also clear that the private sector at the micro level can only dispense with unwanted cash balances in the absence of government paper by increasing their consumption levels.

Given the current tax structure, this reduced desire to net save would generate a private expansion and reduce the deficit, eventually restoring the portfolio balance at higher private employment levels and lower the required fiscal deficit as long as savings desires remain low.

Clearly, there would be no desire for the government to expand the economy beyond its real limit.

Whether this generates inflation depends on the ability of the economy to expand real output to meet rising nominal demand. That is not compromised by the size of the fiscal deficit.

Issuing bonds does not reduce the inflation risk associated with government spending

Building on that discussion, we can now understand why Krugman’s assertion that “a deficit financed by money issue is more inflationary than a deficit financed by bond issue” is plain nonsense.

The mainstream macroeconomic textbooks of which the likes of Krugman think are sound all have a chapter on fiscal policy.

The pedagogy (if you can call the dissemination of fake knowledge pedagogy) are often written in the context of the so-called IS-LM model but not always.

Krugman loves the IS-LM model – in his New York Times article (October 9, 2011) – IS-LMentary – he claimed the approach “has done what good economic models are supposed to do: make sense of what we see, and make highly useful predictions about what would happen in unusual circumstances.”

MMT economists reject the IS-LM model at the most elemental level. It is fraught with unsustainable constructs.

The fiscal policy chapters always introduces the so-called ‘Government Budget Constraint’ that alleges that governments have to “finance” all spending either through taxation; debt-issuance; or money creation.

But as noted above government spending is performed in the same way irrespective of the accompanying monetary operations – that is, by crediting bank accounts.

It is always claimed that “money creation” (borrowing from central bank) is inflationary while the private bond sales is less so.

This is a central contention of Paul Krugman and one that Jared Bernstein, unfortunately, seems to have mimicked.

These conclusions are based on their erroneous claim that “money creation” adds more to aggregate demand than bond sales, because the latter forces up interest rates which crowd out some private spending.

All these claims are without foundation in a fiat monetary system and an understanding of the banking operations that occur when governments spend and issue debt helps to show why.

So what would happen if a sovereign, currency-issuing government (with a flexible exchange rate) ran a fiscal deficit without issuing debt.

Like all government spending, the Treasury would credit the reserve accounts held by the commercial bank at the central bank. So the commercial bank’s assets rise and its liabilities also increase because a deposit would be made.

The transactions are clear: The commercial bank’s assets rise and its liabilities also increase because a new deposit has been made. Further, the target of the fiscal initiative enjoys increased assets (bank deposit) and net worth (a liability/equity entry on their balance sheet). Taxation does the opposite and so a deficit (spending greater than taxation) means that reserves increase and private net worth increases.

This means that there are likely to be excess reserves in the “cash system” which then raises issues for the central bank about its liquidity management as noted above.

The point here is that deposits in the non-government sector rise as a result of the deficit without a corresponding increase in liabilities.

It is this result that leads to the conclusion that deficits increase net financial assets in the non-government sector.

What would happen if there were bond sales? All that happens is that the banks reserves are reduced by the bond sales but this does not reduce the deposits created by the net spending. So net worth is not altered.

What is changed is the composition of the asset portfolio held in the non-government sector.

The funds to pay for the bonds came from financial asset balances which were not being spent.

The only difference between the Treasury “borrowing from the central bank” and issuing debt to the private sector is that the central bank has to use different operations to pursue its policy interest rate target. If it debt is not issued to match the deficit then it has to either pay interest on excess reserves (which most central banks are doing now anyway) or let the target rate fall to zero (the Japan solution).

There is no difference to the impact of the deficits on net worth in the non-government sector.

Mainstream economists would say that by draining the reserves, the central bank has reduced the ability of banks to lend which then, via the money multiplier, expands the money supply.

However, the reality is that:

Building bank reserves does not increase the ability of the banks to lend.

The money multiplier process so loved by the mainstream does not describe the way in which banks make loans.

Inflation is typically caused by aggregate demand growing faster than real output capacity. The reserve position of the banks is not functionally related with that process.

So the banks are able to create as much credit as they can find credit-worthy customers to hold irrespective of the operations that accompany government net spending.

This doesn’t lead to the conclusion that deficits do not carry an inflation risk. All components of aggregate demand carry an inflation risk if they become excessive, which can only be defined in terms of the relation between spending and productive capacity.

It might be that a 6 per cent deficit with full employment might be too expansionary. But then it could be that a 1 per cent of GDP surplus might be too expansionary.

It all depends on the state of non-government spending and saving plans – which I will discuss in Part 3.

There is nothing intrinsically interesting about a 6 per cent deficit or a 2 per cent deficit or any deficit or surplus outcome. It all depends on the spending contributions from the three sectors (government, external and private domestic).

If a fiscal deficit – which is a flow of spending – was adding too much to aggregate demand (spending) at full employment and wasn’t just offsetting the demand drains coming from the external sector (trade deficit) and the private domestic sector (saving overall) – then MMT provides clear guidelines for policy.

As long as the government is politically happy with the private-public mix of economic activity, then it would cut back its deficit to avoid pushing demand into the inflation barrier. If it wanted more public activity and less private, it could do that by implementing fiscal measures to deprive the private sector of disposable income (see Part 1).

But the assertion that the private placement of debt reduces the inflation risk is totally fallacious. It does not.

Hi Bill,
Long time reader, first time commentator.
I’m hoping Jared reads your series in response.
You may not know but a few years back he was on MSNBC on Chris Hayes’ show with Stephanie also as a guest and after she spoke about the need for infrastructure spending, he went on to praise her saying something like “Kelton for President.” So he is a friendly.
I think once we get him thinking about the correct definition of the US dollar supply all else will fall in order. It’s absolutely crazy that people don’t count US treasury securities and US treasury guaranteed agency debt as part of the dollar supply.
Also, I talked with Warren Mosler on facebook and he said he’s offered to meet with Jared in the past and I reiterated that offer as a comment on Jared’s post. This all could be resolved in less than 20 minutes of a face to face discussion.
Thank you for all that you do!

Is there a difference between the Fed selling government bonds vs. selling mortgage backed securities? It seems that the Fed’s holdings of mortgage backed securities has produced a transfer of interest to the Treasury, interest that would otherwise be paid to the private sector. Alrenatively, when the Fed “tightens” policy by selling securities (the mortgage backed securities) back to the private sector it would appear that the private sector would be getting a boost from the additional interest from the bonds while the Fed got back the reserves it issued when it bought the bonds.

If the Fed owns MBS, then the Fed is providing mortgages to those people – but originating them via agency. Since the agent then has no skin in the game, why would they take care to originate the loan properly?

The Fed can obviously provide mortgages to people, since it is a bank, but it should hire the agents – so it can sack them if they dole out bad loans.

“But, governments also know they effectively can control the process whenever they want – and set yields at any maturity they desire via central bank operations.”

The important point, I think, is that the government has no need to issue bonds. So if it is issuing bonds it is doing the private sector a favour.

So it simply sells bonds on a price, not a quantity basis. Or doesn’t bother at all (which is essentially the same as issuing a zero-interest perpetual).

We know from the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency mania that people will quite happily hold zero interest non-cash instruments and bid them up to crazy levels – particularly if the supply is notionally fixed. So the idea that you have to pay interest to people, or even promise to redeem, to get them to hold financial instruments is empirically false.

The basic flaw in interest rate adjustments, strikes me, is that come a recession, there is no obvious reason why it should be attributable to a lack of lending and borrowing rather than a fall in consumer confidence or some other element in aggregate demand, like exports.

Moreover, the basic purpose of the economy is to produce what people want: both in terms of what they buy out of disposable income and in terms of the publically provided stuff they vote for at election time. Thus given a recession, the obvious solution is to increase household incomes (e.g. via tax cuts) and raise public spending .

Having done that, there is no obvious reason why interest rates will not settle down to their free market (i.e. “GDP maximising”) level. The market for loans and savings after all is very much of a free market. People shop around for the best deal when it comes to mortgages and when it comes to finding a home for their savings. I.e. there’s no need for artificial interference in interest rates.

“The Federal Reserve System is supervised by the Board of Governors. Located in Washington, D.C., the Board is a federal government agency consisting of seven members appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. The Board has about 1,850 employees.”

This is the Fed saying that it is a government agency. When did they start saying that?. What changed, public perception perhaps? So, what part of the Fed is now “public?”

Government ‘agencies’ reside within government departments, and are paid through government budgets and revenues. All employees of ‘government agencies’ are government (public service) employees.
None of that is true with the Board of Governors. The Fed is fully supported by our interest payments on their FOMA holdings of public and Agency debt, which they acquire through their ‘money power’. And we the people pay them interest.

Of the 1850 employees, NONE of them are public employees, so please explain how a ‘government agency’ has private bank employees? The Members of the BoG are funded exactly the same as the Officers and Agents of the 12 PRIVATE Regional Fed Banks, they are NOT a government agency. They are privately structured, privately staffed and privately funded. Look at the records.

Who cares what Bernstein says?
Why not campaign to get rid of those stupid “self-imposed constraints” and take back the money system.

“Investment (demand for funds) declines with the interest rate because the costs of funds to invest in (houses, factories, equipment etc) rises.”

Time and again I have been tripping over this sentence, which is repeated in many posts. Should the sentence not rather read: “Investment (demand for funds) declines because the costs of funds to invest in (houses, factories, equipment etc) rise.”

Or: “Investment (demand for funds) declines with a higher interest rate because the costs of funds to invest in (houses, factories, equipment etc) rise.

[“The transactions are clear: The commercial bank’s assets rise and its liabilities also increase because a new deposit has been made. Further, the target of the fiscal initiative enjoys increased assets (bank deposit) and net worth (a liability/equity entry on their balance sheet). Taxation does the opposite and so a deficit (spending greater than taxation) means that reserves increase and private net worth increases.

This means that there are likely to be excess reserves in the “cash system” which then raises issues for the central bank about its liquidity management as noted above.

The point here is that deposits in the non-government sector rise as a result of the deficit without a corresponding increase in liabilities.

It is this result that leads to the conclusion that deficits increase net financial assets in the non-government sector.”]

Bill (or anyone) – this part got a bit confusing to me. It says that once the reserve account is credited, it creates both an asset (the reserves) and a liability (the deposits) for the commercial bank. But then it says that the target of the fiscal initiative enjoys increased assets (deposits) and increased net worth (“liability/equity”). I don’t see the distinction between the commercial bank and the “target”.

Second, sorry if this is elementary at this point but MMT is new to me, but why are net financial assets (as defined above) important? In other words, did economies not function fine prior to the current fiat system?

“Having done that, there is no obvious reason why interest rates will not settle down to their free market (i.e. “GDP maximising”) level. The market for loans and savings after all is very much of a free market.”

Sometimes I wonder if Ralph has learned the basics of MMT. What kind of word salad is that?
Have yo not read ” the natural rate of interest is 0″? There is no “free market”.

The target in this context is the Joe Public whose bank account balance has been increased.

The commercial bank where he has his account has both the asset (the additional reserves), and the liability (Joe can demand it in cash at any time). But for Joe it is a net increase in his financial assets.

Yes actually that does help, but it adds a new question for me. How does Joe Public claim ownership to those funds? I assumed that the deposit liability is claimed by the Fed. Is it because the Fed is not injecting money directly to banks, but is injecting to non-bank private companies/individuals who just happen to hold the money in banks?

I fear you’re overthinking this. The target is merely the person or business that is in receipt of a government payment. The obvious example is a pension payment. Bill is describing the mechanics of how the money is created by the central bank and ultimately ends up in the bank account of Joe Public, the pensioner.

Mr Public might then write a cheque to pay a bill. The clearing of that cheque results in his bank balance going down, and the payee’s balance going up. If they have accounts at different banks, the net effect is a change in the reserve balances for each bank. This is the heart of what the central bank does – it facilitates the payments system.

If Mr Public wants to withdraw cash, the bank has currency on hand. Periodically they will need to order more, and when they do the central bank ships them the notes or coins, and reduces their reserve balance by the total value of the currency shipped.

“Net government spending (deficits) which is not taken into account by the central bank in its liquidity decision, will manifest as excess reserves (cash supplies) in the clearing balances (bank reserves) of the commercial banks at the central bank.”

This is the hardest step to take. While an MMTer would be happy enough to invoke “government spends money into existence”, others will need more elaboration.

Now if government has enough deposits in its account with the Central Bank, it can certainly pay for its spending by debiting that account and crediting the banks’ reserve accounts, thereby creating the above-mentioned excess reserves.

But what if the government has an empty deposit account? Wouldn’t it then by necessity have to first borrow to spend? If it does borrow first, there is first a flow of bank reserves to its deposit account, which means a shortage of reserves, until the government spends and eliminates the shortage.

Of course none of this matters if one treats the Central Bank as consolidated with government. Still, how does the operational reality of separation between government and central bank not make it imperative for government to first borrow before it spends?

The government neither has nor doesn’t have the dollars. It does not even have an account at the central bank. It directs the central bank to mark up the accounts of any recipients of its spending (which is a two-step process, the private bank’s reserve account goes up and the customer’s balance goes up). Voila, the account balance of the recipient is increased. The money does not come from anyone’s account at the central bank, it exists because the government issued it into existence.

The separation you speak of means the central bank sets the target interest rate without interference from the government of the day, has an independent board and so on. But the government is still the currency sovereign, and it dictates when new money gets created.

The government can’t simply direct the Central Bank to mark up the accounts because that would be illegal. Yes, governments can change laws. But MMT’ers say they are describing how monetary operations work right now, i.e. within the existing laws, so they need to square the circle.

Your claim that “MMT’ers say they are describing how monetary operations work right now” is somewhat short of the truth.

In fact, the major Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) economists make it clear that there is an intrinsic reality associated with the Fiat currency system and an operational set of institutional arrangements that may obscure that reality.

None of us are stupid enough not to recognise certain accounting practices that governments voluntarily impose to constrain the freedom they clearly have as the currency issuers.

We have written about the ‘veil of ideology’ that these voluntary constraints reflect.

@bill. MMT doesn’t merely say that government *can* spend money into existence, since that is a claim that doesn’t require MMT. Everyone appreciates that governments can finance deficits by printing money if they so choose. What makes MMT different from the mainstream is that it says government *does* spend money into existence. I might be remiss but I get the impression that it even says government *always* spends money into existence.

One important sentence (also @RET): … when the government spends, the treasury debits its operating account at the central bank, and deposits this money into private bank accounts (and hence into the commercial banking system). This money adds to the total deposits in the commercial bank sector.

Another important sentence (which matches exactly what Bill Mitchell writes above): … If on a particular day, the government spends more than it taxes, reserves have been added to the banking system (see vertical transactions). This will typically lead to a system-wide surplus of reserves …

This description suggests that the government (i.e. Treasury) can only spend more than it taxes if it has sufficient deposits with the central bank to cover the difference. What happens if it doesn’t have sufficient deposits? Not hypothetically, but actually?

Here, a ‘borrow first, spend later’ explanation is simple. The Treasury issues bonds. Banks buy the issues. Bank reserves flow into the Treasury’s account with the central bank, and now the Treasury can spend more than it taxes. Without the bond issue, Treasury can’t run a deficit. What’s the ‘spend first, borrow later’ MMT explanation that is more realistic than this? And how can we tell the difference empirically?

Jason, if the consolidated gov’t doesn’t spend or lend first, the banks or investors wouldn’t have the funds to purchase the tsy securities in the first place. So govt is not borrowing first as that would be impossible.

@Charles Hayden,
We are not looking at the first creation of fiat money. We are looking at right now. Right now for the US, banks have nearly $3 trillion of reserves, which they could use to purchase government securities if they so choose. So no, it is not appropriate to claim that banks don’t have the funds.

To reiterate my questions: If the Treasury wants to run a deficit right now, can it spend without first issuing bonds if it doesn’t have much in the way of deposits at the central bank, with the accompanying note that the central bank is *prohibited by law* from directly financing the deficit? If it can, how is this done in practice?

Jason, before the days of excess reserves since 2008, the saying was ‘you can’t do a reserve drain before doing a reserve add.’ So the Fed would purchase existing Tsy govt securities before the next tsy security auction so the funds would be there in the system to buy the Tsy securities at the next auction. If the Fed does not accommodate Tsy ‘borrowing’ then it would lose control of the overnight rate and other interest rate targets. These secondary activities accomplish what could be done more efficiently with direct Fed lending to the Tsy. Since 2008, it’s like the Fed pre-loaded the system with excess reserves, so it doesn’t have to do reserve add operations auction to auction.

So at any point in time, the funds to pay taxes and buy government securities (which are both reserve drains) come from government spending or lending (reserve adds). To do reserve adds under current institutional structure, the Federal Reserve has to add reserves by spending (or lending) reserves into existence. Our Central Bank does this by marking up accounts in the system with no aprior flow of revenue (security sale proceeds and interest incomes) to spend (or lend). So I think what you are having a hard time with is incorporating Federal Reserve “spending” (or “lending”) as part of consolidated federal government spending (or lending), and/or maybe you haven’t looked at monetary operations at the most basic level, as the buying (or loaning) and selling (or receiving repayment) activities of the CB.

You say that before the days of excess reserves, the Fed would always do open market purchases before Treasury bond issues. Is there documentation for this? And surely this leaves open the possibility that the Fed (or whatever central bank is in the same situation) would rather raise its interest rate target than to accommodate the Treasury’s bond issue? After all, that’s what mainstream economists view as central bank independence.

And even if this sequence is correct, it means that the money creation is happening with the Fed’s open market purchases, and not with the Treasury’s subsequent spending financed by the bond issue. It is thus still the case that Treasury cannot have a deficit before it borrows to finance the deficit. In other words, monetary policy holds the key to money creation, not fiscal policy.

I have no problem with ‘government spends money into existence’ if it only refers to a consolidated government. What I want to clarify is whether the phrase also works with separate Treasury and central bank, so that monetary policy is distinct from fiscal policy. It appears from our discussion that the answer is no. And if the answer is no, then there is little separating MMT from mainstream macroeconomics.

Sorry, I thought I had edited my comment but the old one showed up above. I think the assertion that the Fed would do open market purchases before Treasury issues bonds has surface plausibility, since that is what it would do if it merely observes that the target interest rate is rising as banks bid for reserves to purchase the bond issue.

Still, it is free to let the rate rise, if not immediately, then after one of its scheduled meetings. As long as it is free to do so, then crowding out remains a worry of deficit spending. That could be Powell’s Fed (raising the Fed Funds rate) versus Trump’s Treasury (raising the Treasury’s deficit). That’s purely within mainstream macroeconomics, and so far I’ve seen nothing in our discussion that strays from it. Where then is the MMT’s insight and the mainstream’s error?

Jason – No time at all to say much, but as “Calgacus” I posted something in a comment a few years ago that Wray liked enough to write a main post around it over at New Economic Perspectives. The point is that one has to be vewwwwwwy careful when splitting up the central bank and the treasury (and about using the word “borrowing”). And about precisely what one is saying.

Either consolidate them or don’t consolidate them. Don’t split them up in one place and unconsciously consolidated them in another, don’t assume a priori that the CB is creating money and the Treasury not. If you consistently split the two, pretend that they are distinct opposed entities, it becomes more clear that the Treasury is the one creating the real money and doing the CB favors, not vice versa.

It is clear that the central bank can increase the interest rate unilaterally in most nations under current institutional arrangements. A misguided central bank board might even do that if the treasury department increased the fiscal deficit because it ‘feared’ future inflation.

But then to say this is “purely within mainstream macroeconomics” as it is “crowding out” is a misreading of mainstream economics.

The notion of ‘financial crowding out’ is due to pressure in what mainstream macroeconomists consider to be a market for loans. The interest rate in that market is not set by the central bank but is rather the market clearing outcome of the interplay between savers and investors. The rate rises because there is an excess demand for funds (loans) relative to the supply of loans (saving).

First, the loanable funds doctrine is fantasy, which is a major flaw in mainstream macroeconomics. Savings rise with income not the interest rate. Further, banks can create loans out of thin air on demand from credit-worthy borrowers.

Second, the central bank in the above instance is really reflecting a basic MMT concern – that inflation will kick in when real resource availability is stretched by the growth in nominal spending outpacing the growth of real productive capacity.

That is not a ‘financial crowding out’ story. The fact that the central bank might raise interest rates ‘too early’ and prolong mass unemployment is just a reflection of their poor judgement on what constitutes full employment and the associated inflation risk. History suggests central bank boards go too early.

@Some Guy
I am perfectly happy to focus exclusively on the split into Treasury and Central Bank. Please explain to me how Treasury, and not Central Bank, is the main driver of money creation. How does Treasury spend money into existence without Central Bank acquiescence? Not at the beginning of fiat money issuance, but right now?

@bill
That the central bank can increase the target interest rate unilaterally suggests that monetary policy dominates fiscal policy, which is a mainstream macro result. Brad Delong is fond of saying that central banks are supposed to ensure that Say’s Law is true in practice even if it isn’t in theory. A Treasury that deficit spends with an uncooperative central bank will then crowd out other interest sensitive spending. MMT as I understand it claims otherwise, i.e. that fiscal policy is central. But so far I just haven’t seen the technical argument work out with a split Treasury and central bank.

This will be my last reply to you. It is clear that you have not read much of our work and also do not understand the mainstream macroeconomic theory very well.

First, financial ‘crowding out’ is about the loanable funds market and is not related to central bank pursuing some form of inflation targetting. You keep using the term inappropriately.

Second, the fact that the central bank can increase the target interest rate unilaterally in no way suggests that monetary policy dominates fiscal policy. It just says that the central bank can change interest rates. You need much more to make the next step.

It is clear that interest rate changes do not alter aggregate spending much. The impact is also rather ambiguous. That is not consistent with mainstream theory.

Mainstream macro also have a body of theory about fiscal policy that exploits intertemporal maximisation and other strange assumptions that never apply in the real world. In the long-run fiscal policy is totally ineffective and inflationary in that approach.

No MMT economist thinks that.

Further you claim you “haven’t seen the technical argument” about the matter – I and others have written tens of thousands of words about all of this over many decades. You clearly haven’t read much at all.

Anyway, you have stated your opinion and that will be the end of the discussion. I don’t intend to host the views of a mainstream apologist here.

I’m sorry you feel the need to brush me off so nonchalantly. I am merely trying to work what MMT is saying. I have no interest in defending the mainstream. If it is wrong, the better to correct it sooner.

So far the explanations that Charles Hayden and Some Guy have kindly offered don’t seem to imply that a Treasury, separate from the central bank, can spend money into existence other than by depleting its relatively small deposit account with the central bank. If this is correct, then central banks hold the key to spending. I know that MMT implies otherwise. I’m merely trying to find out how.

I don’t see why you or someone else couldn’t simply have laid out the steps to which this happens in a few sentences. Surely you are not in the habit of requiring that anyone who wants to understand you to read tens of thousands of pages?

I’ll restate my question as simply as possible:

Suppose the Treasury wants to spend $11 million this month, but only has $1 million held at the central bank. The Treasury doesn’t have the power to create reserves, and cannot borrow directly from the central bank, as per normal fiscal rules. How then does the Treasury spend $11 million without first collecting taxes or issuing bonds?

Jason, the US Treasury could order up and mint 40 million quarters and spend them or deposit them at the Fed. There’s your $10 million. The Treasury theoretically could also mint a platinum coin of whatever nominal value it desired and deposit that in its accounts at the Fed. It could spend that on anything Congress has authorized spending for. These are things that Congress has already authorized the US Treasury to do.

It is very obvious that Congress could authorize any amount of physical US currency should it desire to do so and authorize Treasury to spend it. It could also just change the laws that created the Fed and order it to credit Treasury accounts for whatever amount it desired. Or order it to purchase whatever bonds Treasury issued at whatever interest rate Treasury decided. Or just fold it into the Treasury Department. The point is that Congress made the laws that the Fed follows and can unmake them at its pleasure. For some reason Congress has found it desirable to pretend to constrain itself with rules of its own making, but that doesn’t change the fact that (as Ben Bernanke stated) Congress is the boss of the Fed. The Fed is aware of this and acts accordingly.

Maybe you could look at it this way- what are the chances that the US Federal Reserve would ever not honor a legitimate US Treasury check it was presented with, whatever the Treasury’s balance was at the time? The real answer is zero chance- the institution presenting that check will have its account credited by the Fed for the amount of the check and they would figure it all out later.

The problem is that the questions you ask and the language used therein make presuppositions of the kind I mentioned above. As Wray summarizes things if you deconsolidate: “The Fed can only issue “fiat money”; the Treasury issues “tax driven money”. Which would you rather tie your fate to?” [I note that the Treasury constantly but invisibly gives its realer “tax-driven money” – to the Fed.]

As Bill notes above, you have been (deceived into) making large leaps of logic and not noticing the invisible, important things. That is how bad theories and stage magicians work – by misdirection of attention.